Late 1940s Italian Coffee Table - Attributed to Guglielmo Ulrich

This tapered and meticulously executed mahogany and glass coffee table is attributed to Guglielmo Ulrich in the late 1940s. One of the key designers in the evolution of modern Italian Design, Ulrich had by this point moved away from the excess of rare and novel materials that defined his earlier pieces, and towards a renewed simplicity of form, still in excellent woods such as the stained mahogany used here, occasionally embellished with gilded aluminium ‘Xantal’ hardware, as seen in the streamlined and lightly angled sabots which shoe each leg. From these feet the piece rises to a gently flexed, braced joint where the upper body of the table sits parallel across the lengthened cruciform footprint of the lower half, and tapers to a delicately hooked point.
A rectangular glass surface rests atop this to finish a truly elegant coffee table which shows the creativity which overcame earlier decades of orthodox Rationalism and Novocento styles in Italy to unleash imaginative and contemporary approaches to design which persist to this day.